NAU IS A GREETING from New Zealand's Maori language that means "Come to me." The name also neatly implies that the time for such a business has arrived. "That was then, this is Nau," Van Dyke told me a month before his pitch at Bay. "It describes the company as an agent for change."

But what kind of change, exactly? That's been a hot topic in the outdoor industry since the news of Nau's formation broke in May 2005. Why were some of the industry's most talented people flocking to Portland? What would Nau make? What little was known about Nau's direct-to-customer approach sent out shock waves—from mom-and-pop backpacking shops all the way up to REI. Was Nau aiming to become the outdoor Amazon?

I first interviewed Van Dyke in January 2006, and he agreed to give me a year's worth of exclusive access to Nau's inner workings as the company found its way. "Sure, come and hang for a while," he said. "See us yell."

No doubt, fostering an enterprise like this is stressful—especially an operation with Nau's ambitions. By the time I'd made contact with Van Dyke, the original hope of opening 60 stores nationwide in 2007 had already been scaled back. Instead, Nau would debut with four stores (in Boulder, Portland, San Francisco, and Chicago), aim to add another 20 in 2008, and grow to more than 100 by 2010. Ultimately the company wants to have a presence in every major urban center, from San Francisco to Austin to Manhattan.

Van Dyke calculated that Nau would require $57 million in funding, with $31 million of that needed for the launch and the first year. As is often true with startups,

Nau's hip retail plans could be a huge success, but investors see plenty of risk. "It will succeed brilliantly or fail spectacularly," says outdoor-industry analyst Michael Hodgson. "There's no middle ground."

the money would be raised in rounds. Contributions for the first two, which totaled $14 million and closed by the spring of last year, had come with relative ease. Investors ranged from wealthy individuals like Steve Luczo—chairman at computer-hard-drive giant Seagate Technology—to outdoor-industry executives like Peter Metcalf, Black Diamond's CEO. By last summer, Van Dyke was hoping he could tap other deep pockets for the remaining $17 million he needed in 2006.

His pitch—to individual and institutional investors—was that, within a few years, Nau would become a sales machine, with $250 million in annual revenues. He played down the big question marks, like the unorthodox retail concept and consumer willingness to embrace a philanthropy-themed brand. But seasoned moneymen have a sixth sense for weaknesses, and they knew that any sizable setback might cause Nau to collapse. Van Dyke was pitching nothing less than a radical business experiment that promised to be a hairy ride.

"It will either succeed brilliantly or fail spectacularly," predicts Michael Hodgson, president of Specialty News, a leading outdoor-industry trade publication. "There's no middle ground."

Appropriately, Nau was founded on extreme principles. Eric Reynolds, a mercurial 54-year-old mountaineer and entrepreneur, came up with the idea long before Van Dyke was recruited to help make it happen. Reynolds, who cofounded the outerwear brand Marmot in 1974, later went on to head a water-purifier company and then become an outdoor-industry consultant. But he never found his work fulfilling, and he says that society's destructive behaviors and the abuse of natural resources were a source of constant personal frustration. Reynolds, who grew up in Davis, California, reveres the teachings of humanitarian icons like Mahatma Gandhi, which were drilled into him by his parents from a young age.

"A family doctrine was that every person could change the world," Reynolds told me when I met him last summer in Davis. He lives in Boulder but was coming through on his way to Yosemite. "I kept thinking, How can I create something that will magnify my desire to give?"

Reynolds, unfortunately, had grappled for decades with depression. This could make day-to-day functioning hard, and he had a reputation as a big thinker who didn't always execute. In 1997, he entered into a six-year battle with the disease. In the summer of 2003, Reynolds vacationed in Yosemite with family and friends, where they discussed the world's "increasingly troubling times" and what had to be done. Not long after, he was walking the aisles at the Outdoor Retailer trade show, in Salt Lake City, when the idea for Nau came to him, complete with the charitable element.

"During the transaction, the customer gets asked to look into his heart," said Reynolds. "I believe that experience will be so out of character that most people will have to mention it to someone else."

He honed his concept for 12 months and bounced the idea off some peers, who loved it. And though there's no way to know if consumers care enough about good deeds to influence their shopping patterns, there's a sense among experts that the time is right. According to LOHAS Journal, a magazine that tracks business trends, there's a growing $229 billion consumer marketplace focused on "conscious commerce." Companies from organic-cotton-clothing brand Loomstate to Whole Foods have successfully built brands that are considered cool partly because of their regard for the planet.

Reynolds registered his company's working name in Colorado as UTW. The acronym stands for "Unfuck the World," a phrase coined by Michael Franti, the cause-oriented lead singer for the band Spearhead.

Reynolds also set out to hire a management team, and the first place he looked was Patagonia. The 33-year-old Ventura, California–based gear-and-outdoor-clothing company enjoys iconic status as a top-notch apparel maker that's both an environmental and philanthropic leader, pioneering the development of recycled performance fabrics and setting the industry's gold standard by giving 1 percent of its sales to charity. Reynolds didn't have a dime to pay anyone, but he believed he could win people over by offering stock options and packaging the business as a sort of next-gen Patagonia.

In July 2004, Reynolds sat down for lunch in a Santa Monica restaurant with Mark Galbraith, 46, who at the time was one of Patagonia's top designers. The two discussed music and philanthropy before Reynolds excused himself from the table. He reappeared wearing a gray T-shirt that read unfuck the world. Reynolds broke out his business plan and the two men pored over it until 11 p.m. Galbraith was sold.

"I told Eric that if he got the funding and the team together, I was in," Galbraith would later say. "It was a killer idea."